If a person suffers from a urinary incontinence, specifically if a person suffers from a stress urinary incontinence, then urine leakage can be caused by application of abdominal pressure during normal exercise or by laughing, coughing, sneezing or the like. The cause of this can be, for example, that the pelvic floor muscle which is a muscle for supporting the urethra is loosened by birth or the like.
For the treatment of urinary incontinence, a surgical treatment is effective, in which there is used, for example, a tape-shaped implant called a “sling.” The sling is indwelled inside the body and the urethra is supported by the sling (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-99499). In order to indwell the sling inside the body, an operator could incise the vagina wall with a surgical knife, dissect a living body tissue between the urethra and the vagina, and, by use of a puncture needle or the like, form a piercing hole which communicates with the dissected living body tissue and the outside of the body. Then, the sling is inserted into the piercing hole, and the sling is indwelled in the dissected living body tissue inside the body.
At the time of inserting the sling into the piercing hole, the inserting operation is conducted with the sling kept inserted in a flexible tube. Since the tube is flexible, however, the tube could be flattened or pressed by the dissected living body tissue. As a result, there have been cases where the friction between the tube and the living body tissue could make it difficult to carry out the sling-inserting operation.